Birnam Wood

It rained all that September, a grim, cold, bleached-out rain that found the holes in the roof and painted the corners with a black creeping mold that felt greasy to the touch. Heat would have dried it up, or at least curtailed it, but there was no heat—or insulation, either—because this was a summer rental, the price fixed for the season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and the season was over. Long over. Back in May, when Nora was at school out West and I sent her a steady stream of wheedling letters begging her to come back to me, I’d described the place as a cottage. But it wasn’t a cottage. It was a shack, a converted chicken coop from a time long gone, and the landlord collected his rent in summer, then drained the pipes and shut the place down over the winter, so that everything in it froze to the point where the mold died back and the mice, disillusioned, moved on to warmer precincts.

In the summer, we’d been outside most of the time, reading and lazing in the hammock till it got dark, after which we’d either listened to records or gone out to a club or somebody’s house. We had a lot of friends—my friends, that is, people I’d grown up with—and we could just show up anytime, day or night, and get a party going. On weekends, I’d unfold the geological-survey maps of Fahnestock or Harriman Park and we’d pick out a lake in the middle of nowhere and hike in to see what it looked like in the shimmering world of color and movement. Almost always we’d have it to ourselves, and we’d swim, sunbathe, pass a joint and a bota bag of sweet red wine, and make love under the sun, while the trees swayed in the breeze and the only sound was the sound of the birds. Nora didn’t have a tan line all summer. Neither did I.

But then it was September and it was raining and I had to go back to work. I was substitute-teaching at the time, a grinding, chaotic, thankless job, but I didn’t really have a choice—we needed money to stay alive, same as anybody else. Nora could have worked—she had her degree now and she could have substituted, could have done anything—but the idea didn’t appeal to her, and so, on the three or four days a week that I was summoned to one school or another, she was at home, listening to the rain drool from the eaves and trickle into the pots we’d set out under the worst of the leaks. I sprang for a cheap TV to keep her company, and then an electric heater the size of a six-pack of beer that nonetheless managed to make the meter spin like a 45. But we weren’t paying utilities—the landlord was. I’d given him a lump sum at the end of May, and now we were getting our own back. One morning, when I was at work, he used his key to let himself in and found Nora in bed, the blankets pulled up to her neck and the TV rattling away, and he backed out the door, embarrassed, without saying a word. The next day, we got the eviction notice. The day after that, he cut off the electricity.

I was cooking by candlelight over the gas stove a few nights later (Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli, out of the can, with a side of iceberg lettuce cut in wedges), when Nora edged up beside me. We’d been drinking Burgundy out of the gallon jug we kept under the sink as a way of distracting ourselves from the obvious. The house crepitated around us. It wasn’t raining, at least not right then, but there was a whole lot of dripping going on, dripping that had emerged as the defining soundtrack of our lives in the absence of music.

Her hair shone greasily in the candlelight. She’d twisted it into pigtails for convenience, because the water heater was defunct now, definitely defunct, and there was no way to take a shower unless we went over to a friend’s house—and that involved the hassle of actually getting in the car and going someplace, when it was so much easier just to pile up the blankets on the bed, get stoned, and watch the shadows creep over the beams that did such an admirable job of holding up the slanted portion of the roof. Nora gazed into the pot on the stove. “I can’t live like this,” she said.

“No,” I said, and I was in full agreement here. “Neither can I.”

The first place we looked at was also a seasonal rental, though for a different season. It was another crumbling outbuilding, in the same summer colony, but it had been tricked up with heat and insulation because the landlady—eighty, ninety, maybe, with eyes like crushed glass and hair raked back so tightly you could make out the purple-splotched ruin of her scalp beneath—saw the advantage of renting through the winter and spring to whoever was left behind when the summer people went back to the city. I didn’t begrudge her that. I didn’t begrudge her anything. I didn’t even know her. Nora had circled an ad in The Pennysaver, dialled the number, and now here she was, the old lady, waiting for us on the porch, out of the rain, and the minute we pulled into the driveway she began waving impatiently for us to jump out of the car, hurry up the steps, and get the business over with.

There were two problems with the house, the first apparent to all three of us, the second only to Nora and me. That problem, hovering over us before we even walked in the door, was that we were looking for a deal, because we didn’t have the kind of money to put down for a deposit or first and last months’ rent, just enough for now, for the current month—enough, we hoped, to get us out of the converted chicken coop and into someplace with heat and electricity till we could think what to do next. The old lady—Mrs. Fried—didn’t look as if she would let things slide. Just the opposite. She gazed up at us out of her fractured eyes with the expectation of one thing only: money.

But then there was the first problem, which obviated the need to dwell on the second. The place was too small, smaller even than the shack we were living in, and we saw that the minute we stepped through the door. There were two rooms, bedroom and living room/kitchen, and to the right of the door, in a little recess, a bathroom the size of the sweatbox in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” We never got that far. We just stood there, the three of us, and gazed into the bedroom, which was off the narrow hall. The bedroom was too cramped for anything but the single bed that was squeezed into it. A second single, made up with an Army blanket and sheets gone gray with use, was pushed up against the wall in the hallway so that you had no more than a foot’s leeway to get around it and into the front room. The old lady read our faces, read our minds—or thought she did—and gestured first at the bed in the hallway and then at the one in the bedroom. “Ven you vant,” she said, shrugging, her delicate wheeze of a voice clinging to the hard consonants of her youth, “you come.”

If Nora found it funny, laughing so hard that she couldn’t seem to catch her breath as we ducked back into the car, I didn’t. I was the one put in the awkward position here, I was the provider, and what was she? It was the sort of question you didn’t ask, because it stirred resentment, and resentment was what had brought us down the first time around. I put the car in gear and drove along the dark tree-choked tunnel of the street, turned right, then right again, and swung into the muddy drive where the shack stood awaiting us. Inside, it smelled like a tomb. I could see my breath, even after I’d flicked on all four burners of the stove. Not sixty seconds went by before Nora said something that set me off, and I came right back at her—“We wouldn’t be in this fucking mess if you’d get up off your ass and find a job”—and when we went to bed, early, to save on candles, it was for the warmth and nothing else.

There was no call the next morning, and I had mixed feelings about that. I dreaded the calls, but they meant money—and money was the beginning and end of everything there was, at least right then. When the phone did finally ring, it was half past twelve, and it went off like a flash bomb in the dream I was having, a dream that made me so much happier than the life I jolted awake to that I wanted it to go on forever. My eyes opened on the slanted ceiling, and my first thought was that even the chickens must have hated staring up at it, the sameness of it, day after day, until you lost your head and your feathers and somebody dropped you into a frying pan. Nora was propped up beside me, reading. Rain rapped insistently at the roof. “Well,” she said. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

The cold pricked me everywhere, like acupuncture, and I clutched my jeans to my groin, fumbled with a sweatshirt, and hobbled across the room to snatch up the phone. It was my best friend, Artie, whom I’d known since elementary school. He didn’t bother with a greeting. “You find a place yet?”

“Uh-uh, no.”

“Well, I might’ve found something for you—”

I glanced at Nora. She’d put down her book and she was watching me now, her eyes squinted to slits in the fierceness of her concentration. “Who is it?” she mouthed, but I ignored her.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“I didn’t know if you’d be interested, because it’s not a real rental—it’s more like housesitting—and it’s only temporary, like from next week through the end of April. It’s a friend of my father’s. An old guy and his wife. They go to Florida every winter and they want somebody in the house—or the apartment, there’s an apartment in the basement, above ground, with windows and all—just so they don’t get anybody breaking in. I was there once when I was a kid. It’s nice. On a private lake. A place called Birnam Wood. You ever hear of it?”

“No,” I said.

“Would you be interested at all?”

“You got a phone number?”

I told Nora not to get too excited, because chances were it wouldn’t work out. Either we wouldn’t want the place—there had to be something wrong with it, right?—or they, the old couple, wouldn’t want us, once they got a look at us. Still, I phoned right away and the old man answered on the first ring. I introduced myself, talking fast, too fast maybe, because it wasn’t till I dropped the name of Artie’s father that the voice on the other end came to life. “Yes, we are expecting your call,” the old man said, and he had some sort of accent, too, hesitating over the “w” in “we,” as if afraid it would congeal on him, and in a sudden jolt of paranoia I wondered if he and Mrs. Fried were somehow in league—or, worse, if he was Mrs. Fried, throwing her voice to catch me unawares. But no, the place was miles away, buried in the woods in the hind end of Croton, well beyond the old lady’s reach. He gave the address, then directions, but they were so elaborate I stopped listening midway through, thinking instead of what Artie had said: the place was on a lake. A private lake. I’d find it, no problem. How many private lakes could there be? I told the old man that we’d like to come have a look—at his earliest convenience, that is.

“When”—the hesitation again—“would you like to come?”

“I don’t know—how about now? Now O.K.?”

There was a long pause, during which Nora flapped both hands at me as if to say, “Don’t sound too eager,” and then the old man, in his slow, deliberate way, said, “Yes, that will suit us.”

We were late getting there, very late, actually, one snaking blacktop road looking much like the next, the rain hammering down, and Nora digging into me along the lines of “You’re a real idiot, you know that?” and “Why in God’s name didn’t you write down the directions?” For a while, it looked like a lost cause, trees crowding the road, nobody and nothing around except for the odd mailbox and the watery flash of a picture window glimpsed through the vegetation, but finally, after backing in and out of driveways and retracing our path half a dozen times, we came to a long low stone wall with a gated entrance flanked by two stone pillars. The gate—wrought iron coated in black enamel so slick it glowed—stood open. A brass plaque affixed to the pillar on the right read “Birnam Wood.” I didn’t want to bicker, but I couldn’t help pointing out that we’d passed by the place at least three times already and Nora should have kept her eyes open, because I was the one driving and she was the one doing all the bitching, but she just ignored me, because the gravel of the private lane was crunching under our tires now and there were lawns and tennis courts opening up around us. Then the first house rose up out of the trees on our left, a huge towering thing of stone and glass with a glistening black slate roof and too many gables to count, even as the lake began to emerge from the mist on the other side of the road.

“Wow, you think that’s it?” Nora’s voice was pitched so low she might have been talking to herself. “Artie did say it was a mansion, right?” I could feel her eyes on me. “Well, didn’t he?”

I didn’t answer. A moment ago, I’d been worked up, hating her, hating the broken-down car with its bald tires and rusted-out panels that was the only thing we could afford, hating the trees and the rain, hating nature and rich people and the private lakes you couldn’t find unless you were rich yourself, unless you had a helicopter, or a whole fleet of them, and now suddenly a different mix of emotions was surging through me—surprise, yes, awe even, but a kind of desperation, too. Even as the next house came into view on the right—ivy-covered brick with three wings, half a dozen chimneys, and a whole fairway of lawn sweeping down to the lake and the two red rowboats pulled up on a perfect little crescent of beach—I knew that I had to live here or die, and that I’d do anything it took, right down to licking the old man’s shoes, to make that happen.

“What’s the number?” I said. “You see a number on that house?”

She didn’t. She’d lost her glasses—she was always losing her glasses—and in our rush to get out the door she hadn’t bothered with her contacts, either. No matter. The road took us over a stone bridge and swept us directly into the driveway of the house we were looking for—No. 14. We got out of the car, the rain slackening now, and just stared up at the place, a big rearing brown-timbered Tudor that sat right on the lake itself. Around the corner I could make out a gazebo and a little dock with a rowboat tethered to it, this one painted green. And swans. Swans on the lake.

Everything seemed to brighten suddenly, as if the sun were about to break through. “All right,” I said. “Here goes.” And I took Nora by the hand and led her up the flagstone steps to the front door.

I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that’s what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn’t just live together—they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they collected along the way. Mr. and Mrs. Kuenzli—Anton and Eva—were just like that. They met us at the door, two dwarfish old people who were almost identical, except that she was wearing a dress and had dyed her hair and he wasn’t and hadn’t. They gave us tea in a big room overlooking the lake and then escorted us around the house to show off their various collections—Mexican pottery, jade figurines, seascapes painted by a one-armed man they’d encountered in Manila. Every object had a story connected to it. They took turns filling in the details, no hurry at all. I knew what they were doing: checking us out, trying to get a read on us. I shrugged it off. If they were alarmed at the sight of us (this was in a time when people our age wore beads and serapes and cowboy boots and grew their hair long for the express purpose of sticking it to the bourgeoisie), they didn’t show it. Still, it was a good hour before we went downstairs to the basement, which was where we were going to live, after all. That is, if things worked out.

They did. I made sure they did. The minute we walked down the stairs I was hooked—and I could see that Nora was, too. Here was a huge room—low-ceilinged, but the size of a basketball court—with a kitchen off to the left and next to it a bedroom with curtains, framed pictures on the walls, and twin beds separated by matching night tables fitted out with ashtrays and reading lamps, just like the room that every TV couple slept in, chastely and separately, so as not to confront the American family with the disturbing notion that people actually engaged in sexual relations. Nora gave me a furtive glance. “Ven you vant, you come,” she said under her breath, and we both broke up.

Then it was back out into the main room and the real kicker, the deal-sealer, the sine qua non—a regulation-size slate-topped pool table. A pool table! All this—leather armchairs, Persian carpets, gleaming linoleum, heat, twin beds, the lake, the rowboat, swans—and a pool table, too? It was too much. Whatever the old man was asking for rent, because this wasn’t strictly housesitting and we were willing to make a token monthly payment, I was ready to double. Triple. Anything he wanted. I squeezed Nora’s hand. She beamed up at me as the old couple looked on, smiling, moved now by the sight of us there in the depths of that house that had no doubt harbored children at one time, grandchildren even.

I felt a vast calm settle over me. “We’ll take it,” I said.

At the end of the first week, after checking on us six or seven times a day (or spying on us, as Nora insisted), Mrs. Kuenzli fretting over how we were getting along—Fine, thanks—and even creaking down the stairs one night with a pot of homemade chicken-spaetzle soup, the old couple climbed into a limousine and went off to the airport, leaving us in possession. The main house was sealed off, of course, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was getting out of the shack. What I cared about was Nora. Making her happy. Making myself happy—and everybody else, too. Within days of the Kuenzlis’ departure, my friends began showing up unannounced for the purpose of shooting eight ball and cranking up the volume on the Bang & Olufsen sound system the Kuenzlis had at some point so fortuitously installed, then maybe getting wrecked and taking the rowboat out on the glittering surface of the lake while the trees flamed and the swans bobbed in our wake. Even the weather coöperated. If September had been a loss, one of the coldest and rainiest on record, October tiptoed in on a streak of pure sunshine and temperatures that climbed into the seventies.

I was shooting pool one Saturday afternoon with Artie and another friend, Richard, all three of us wired on black beauties and chain-drinking cheap beer, when Nora came in the door, looking flushed. She had news. While we’d been frittering our time away—that was how she put it, “frittering,” but she was smiling now, hardly able to contain herself—she’d gone out on her own to interview for a job.

I loved her in that moment, loved the way the color came into her face because she was addressing all three of us now, not just me, and that made her self-conscious no matter the news, which was good, very good, I could see that in an instant. “Well,” I said, “you get it?”

The smile stalled, came back again. She nodded. “It’s not much,” she said, already retreating. She looked from me to Artie and Richard. “Minimum wage—but it’s six nights a week.”

I’d set down my pool cue and was coming across the room to her, that big room with its buffed floors and the carpets thick enough for anything, when I noticed she was all dressed up, and not in business clothes but in the fringed boots and gauzy top she wore when we were going barhopping. “What is it,” I said, “that hostessing thing?”

She nodded.

“At Brennan’s?”

Her smile was gone now. Her eyes—she was wearing her false lashes and pale-blue eyeshadow—sank into mine. I was the one who’d told her about the job, which Richard had heard about from the bartender there. “All you have to do is smile,” I’d told her. “All you have to do is say ‘Party of four?’ and let them follow you to the table. You can do that, can’t you?” I hadn’t meant to be demeaning. Or maybe I had. She was strong-willed, but I wanted to break her down, make her dependent, make her mine, but at the same time I wanted her to hold up her end, because we were a couple and that was what couples did. They worked. Both of them.

I took her by the hand, tried to peck a kiss to her cheek, but she pulled away.

“It means I’ll be gone nights.”

I shrugged. I could feel Artie and Richard watching me. There was a record on the stereo—I remember this clearly—something drum-based, with a churning polyrhythmic beat that seemed to fester under my words. “At least it’s something,” I said.

We settled into a routine. The phone rang in the dark and I got up, answered it, and found out what school I was going to because somebody who just couldn’t stand another day of it had called in sick—either that or hanged himself—and I was back home by three-thirty or four, at which point she’d be drinking coffee and making herself scrambled eggs and toast. Then I’d drive her to work and either sit there at the bar for a couple (depending on how I was feeling about our financial situation), or go back home and shoot pool by myself, pitting Player A against Player B and trying not to play favorites, until she got off, at ten, and I went to pick her up. Sometimes we’d linger at the bar, but most nights—weeknights, anyway—we’d go back home, because I needed the sleep. We climbed into our separate beds, snug enough, warm and dry and feeling pampered—or, if not pampered, at least secure—and when I switched off my lamp and turned to the wall the last image fading in my brain was of the steady bright nimbus of Nora’s light and her face shining there above her book.

The weather held all that month, even as the leaves persisted and the lake rippled under the color of them. Whenever we could, we went out in the rowboat, and though we never acknowledged it, I suppose we were both thinking the same thing—that we’d better take advantage of it while we could, because each day of sun might be the last. I’d row and Nora would lie back against the seat in the stern, her eyes closed and her bare legs stretched out before her. What did I feel? Relaxed. As relaxed as I’ve ever felt in my life, before or since. There was something more to it, too. I felt powerful, the muscles of my arms flexing and releasing, while Nora dozed at my feet and the rest of the world went as still as held breath.

It was a feeling that couldn’t last. And it didn’t. Less than a week into November, there was frost on the windshield when I got up for school, and the sun seemed to have vanished, replaced by a low cloud cover and winds out of the north. Finally, reluctantly, I pulled the rowboat ashore and turned it over for the winter. Two days later, there was a rim of ice around the lake and the temperature went down into the teens overnight. But, as I said, the house was warm and well-insulated, with a furnace that could have heated six houses, and when we went to bed at night we couldn’t resist joking about the shack, what we’d be suffering if we were still there. “My feet,” Nora would say, “they’d freeze to the floor like when you touch the tip of your tongue to the ice-cube tray.” “Yeah,” I’d say, “yeah, but you wouldn’t even notice because by then we’d be dried up and frozen like those mummies they found in the Andes.” And she’d laugh, we’d both laugh, and listen to the whisper of the furnace as it clicked on and drove warm air through the bedroom and into the big room beyond, where the pool table stood draped in darkness.

And then came the night when I dropped her off at Brennan’s and had my first drink and then another and didn’t feel like going home. It was as if some gauge inside me had been turned up high, all the way, top of the dial. I felt like that a lot back then—and maybe it was just an overload of testosterone, maybe that was all it was—but on this night I sat at the bar and kept on drinking. I knew the regulars, an older crowd who came in for dinner and gradually gave way to people like Nora and me, the music shifting from a soft whisper of jazz to the rock and roll we wanted to hear, as the late diners gathered up their coats and gloves and doggie bags and headed out into the night. I’d been talking a lot of nothing to a guy in a sports coat who must have been in his thirties, a Martini drinker, and when he got up and left, a guy my own age slid onto the stool beside me. He asked me what was happening at the same time that I asked him, then he ordered a drink—tequila-and-tonic, very West Coast, or hip, that is—and we started talking. His name was Steve. He had rust-red hair, kinked out to his shoulders, and he wore a thin headband of braided leather.

What did we talk about? The usual—bands, drugs, what concerts we’d been to—but then we started in on books, and I was pleased and surprised, because most of the people I ran into in that time and place didn’t extend themselves much beyond the Sunday comics. We were debating some fine point of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” testing each other’s bona fides—he could quote passages from memory, a talent I’ve never had—when Nora leaned in between us to brush a kiss to my lips, then straightened up and shook out her hair with a quick neat flip of her head. “My heels are killing me,” she said. “And this top—Jesus, I’m freezing.” She stole a look around, gave Steve a vacant smile, picked up my drink, and downed it in a single gulp. Then she was gone, back to her post at the station by the door.

Steve gave a low whistle. “Wow,” he said. “That your old lady?”

I just shrugged, nonchalant, elevated in that instant above everybody in the place. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but something stirred in me whenever I looked up and saw the way the men watched her as she tapped across the floor in her heels, trailing husbands and wives and sometimes even kids behind her, but it wasn’t something good or admirable.

“Man, I’d love to—” he began, and then caught himself. “You are one lucky dude.”

Another shrug. My feelings were complicated. I’d been drinking. And what I said next was inexcusable, I know that, and I didn’t mean it, not in any literal sense, not in the real world of twin beds and Persian carpets and all the rest, but what I was trying to convey here was that I wasn’t tied down—old lady—wasn’t a husband, not yet, anyway, and that all my potentialities were intact. “I don’t know,” I said. “She can be a real pain in the ass.” I took a sip of my drink, let out a long, withering sigh. “Sometimes I think she’s more trouble than she’s worth, know what I mean?”

That was all I said, or some variant of it, and then there was another drink and the conversation went deeper, and I guess somehow Steve must have got the impression that we weren’t really all that committed, that living together was an experiment gone sour, that we were both—she and I—on the brink of something else. There was an exchange of phone numbers and addresses (Birnam Wood? Cool. I used to swim in the lake there when I was a kid), and then he was gone and the crowd at the bar began to thin. The minute he left I forgot him. Next thing I knew, Nora was there, dressed in her long coat and her knit hat and gloves, perched high on the platform of her heels.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

She gave me a tired smile. “Have fun?”

“Yeah.” I smiled back.

“Did you know it’s snowing out?”

“Really?”

“Really.” And then a beat. “You want me to drive?”

It was a long way home, twenty, twenty five minutes in the best of conditions, but, with the snow and the worn tires and the fact that Nora didn’t see too well at night, it must have taken us twice as long as that. We were the only ones on the road. The snow swept at the headlights and erased everything in front of us. I tried not to be critical, but every time we went around a curve the car sailed out of control and I suppose I got vocal about it, because at one point she pulled over, her lips drawn tight and her eyes furious in the sick yellow glare of the dashboard. “You want to drive?” she said. “Go ahead, be my guest.”

When we got home (finally, miraculously), the phone was ringing. I could hear it from outside the door, making its demands. It took me a minute, pinning a glove under one arm and struggling to work the key in the lock as the snow sifted down and Nora stamped impatiently. “Hurry up, I have to pee,” she said between clenched teeth. Then we were in, the phone ringing still—it must have been the sixth or seventh ring—and I flicked on the lights while Nora made a dash for the bathroom and I crossed the room to pick up the phone.

“Hello?” I gasped, out of breath and thinking it must be Artie, because who else would be calling at that hour?

“Hey, what’s happening,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “This Keith?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“Steve.”

“Steve?”

“From the bar, you know. Like earlier? Brennan’s?” I heard Nora flush the toilet. The cover was off the pool table because I’d left in the middle of a climactic match between Player A and Player B, all the angles still in play. I listened to the water rattle in the pipes. And then Steve’s voice, low, confidential: “Hey, I was just wondering. Is Nora there?”

The bathroom door clicked open. There was a buzzing in my skull. Everything was wrong. “No,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis, though there was no one there to see it. “She’s not in.”

“When’ll she be back?”

I said nothing. I watched her swing open the bathroom door, saw her face there, the pristine towels on the rack, and the copper-and-gold wallpaper that Mrs. Kuenzli must have gone to some special store to pick out because she wanted the best, only the best. The voice on the other end of the line was saying something else, insinuating, whispering in my ear like a disease, and so I bent down to where the phone was plugged into the wall and pulled it out of the socket.

“Who was that?” Nora asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “Wrong number.”

She gave me a doubtful look. “You were on the line long enough.”

I wanted to do something right for a change, wanted to take hold of her and press her to me, confess, tell her that I loved her, but I didn’t. I just said, “You feel like a game of pool? I’ll spot you two balls—”

“You play,” she said. “I’m beat. I think I’ll get ready for bed and read for a while.” She paused at the bedroom door to give me a sweet, tired smile. “You’ve got to admit, Player B’s a lot better than I am, anyway.”

No argument there. I turned on the light over the table, cued up a record and took up the game where I’d left off. I was deep into my third game, on a real roll on behalf of Player A, the balls dropping as if I didn’t even have to use the stick, as if I were willing them in, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. Two thumps. A pause. And then two thumps more.

I was just laying down the stick, any number of scenarios going through my head—it was a stranded motorist, the guy who drove the snowplow come to complain about the tail end of the car sticking out into the street, Artie braving the elements for a nightcap—when Nora came out of the bedroom, looking puzzled. She was in her pajamas, the kind kids wear, with a drawstring around the waist and a fold-down collar. Pink, with a flight of bluebirds running up and down her limbs and flapping across her chest. Her feet were bare. “Who’s that?” she asked. “Artie?”

I didn’t know what was coming, couldn’t have guessed. I was in my own house, shooting pool and listening to music while the snow fell outside and the furnace hummed and my girlfriend stood there in her pajamas. “Must be,” I said, even as the knock came again and a voice, muffled by the door, called out, “Keith? Nora? Knock-knock. Anybody home?”

I opened the door on Steve, his hair matted now and wet with snow. He was holding a bottle of tequila by the neck and he raised it in offering as he stamped in through the door. “Hey,” he said, handing me the bottle, “cool place.” He shrugged out of his jacket, dropping it right there on the floor. “Anybody down for a little action? Nora, how about you? A shot? Want to do a shot?”

She looked at him, bewildered—or maybe it was that she wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to squint to take him in. I just stood there, the bottle like a brick in my hand—or no, a cement block, a weight, avoirdupois, dragging me down.

Steve never hesitated. He crossed the room to her, digging in his pocket for something, grinning and glassy-eyed. “Here,” he said, producing an envelope. “After I saw you tonight? You’re so beautiful. I don’t even know if you know how beautiful—and sexy. You’re really sexy.” He handed her the envelope, but she wasn’t looking at the envelope, she was looking at me. “I wrote you a poem,” he said. “Go ahead. Read it.”

“Steve,” I was saying, “look, Steve, I think—” but I couldn’t go on because of the way Nora was staring at me, her lips parted and her eyes come violently to life.

“Read it,” he repeated. “I wrote it for you, just for you—”

“Look,” I said, “it’s late,” and I moved toward him and actually took hold of his arm in an attempt to steer him away and out the door, back into the snow and out of our lives. “Nora’s tired,” I said.

He never turned, never even acknowledged me. “Let her say it. You’re not tired, are you?”

For the first time, she shifted her eyes to him. “No,” she said finally. “No, I’m not tired at all.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I’d set the bottle down on the desk and I was pulling on my coat, furious suddenly, and then I was out the door and into the night, the snow swirling overhead and Steve’s voice—“So you want a hit of tequila?”—trailing off behind me with a soft, hopeful, rising inflection.

Outside, the snow made a noise, a kind of hiss, as if the night had come alive. I walked twice around the house, cursing myself—but I wouldn’t go back in, I wouldn’t, not till whatever was going to happen had happened and he was gone—and then I found myself huddling under the gazebo. I turned my collar up, pulled on my gloves. There was a wind now and a taste of cold northern forest on the air. I walked out on the dock and stood there for I don’t know how long, the lake locked up like a vault below me. That was when I noticed the light in the house directly across the lake from ours, the one with all the chimneys and the two red rowboats that were turned over now, twin humps like moguls in the snow. It was the only light visible anywhere, a single lamp burning in a window on the ground floor of the wing nearest the lake. What came over me I can’t say—what the impulse was, I mean—but I lowered myself down off the edge of the dock and started across the lake. The wind was in my face. There were no stars. And the footing was bad, drifting powder over ice as clear as if it had come out of a machine. I went down twice, hard, but picked myself up and kept on.

When I got close, when I came up the crescent of beach past the rowboats and on up the slope of the whitening lawn, I saw that the curtains were open, which explained the resiliency of the light. The people there—and I didn’t know them, not at all, not even by sight—must have left the curtains open purposely, I realized, because of the snow, the romance of it, the first snow of the season. It came to me that I was trespassing. Peeping. That, once the sun came up, anybody would be able to see my tracks. But, as soon as the thought entered my head, I dismissed it, because I didn’t care about any of that—I’d gone out of myself, fixated on that light. Still, I kept to the shadows. I might even have crouched down in the bushes; I don’t know.

What I saw was an ordinary room, a bedroom, lit like a stage. I saw a bed, an armoire, pictures on the wall. A shadow flickered across the room, then another, but for the longest time I didn’t see anything. And then the man came into view, padding back and forth, undressing, getting ready for bed. How old was he? I couldn’t tell, not really. Older than me, but not old. He settled into the bed—a double bed, queen-size, maybe—flicked on the lamp there and picked up a magazine and began reading. At some point, he set it down and seemed to be saying something to the other person in the room—the wife, I guessed—but of course it was just a murmur to me. And then, as if she’d heard her cue and stepped out of the wings, there she was, in a nightgown, fussing around her side of the bed before finally settling in and turning on her own light.

I felt guilty. I felt sick. And I didn’t see anything revealing—or sexual, that is—no snuggling or stroking or even a kiss. They were night owls, those people. That light burned a long time. I know. Because I stayed there till it went out. ♦

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